This dense and enjoyable book is a
compilation of key contributions to the Ars Electronica festival,
conference and exhibition series that began in Linz, Austria, in
1979. The book provides a compact record of thinking in digital media
and art spanning 20 years. The articles are short and digestible, and
are based on talks and presentations given at the conferences. Some
contributions may have appeared elsewhere in published form. The
contributions are from writers of note in the digital realm,
including Paul Virilio, Marvin Minsky, and Sadie Plant, as well as
celebrated art practitioners. It is a reassuring tome, a near
pocket-sized compendium or travel guide to 20 years of speculative
cultural studies, a worthy reader for any digital artist or theorist.
As such it presents as un-indexed raw material, but in chronological
order, and under the loose headings of History, Theory and
Practice.

Considering the span and importance
of the compilation it is surprising that there is so little probing
by the compilers of what this 20 year period amounts to. There is
only the briefest reflection on trends, milestones, and watershed
moments. There is plenty about electronic media, but little
reflection on the narratives themselves that seem to be constructed
around it: the predictions, promises, hopes, claims, conflicts, and
the ageing fissures in the enthusiasm for electronic media exposed by
the passage of time. Perhaps it is for others (those less in debt to
the 74 or so contributors) to chart critically the social phenomenon
of digital media theory construction.

Such probing might expose the
pivotal role of certain world events: the decline of the cold war,
and the events of the Gulf War of the early 1990s, the latter of
which seems to have provided boundless opportunity to reflect on the
role of information in terror, deception and counter-deception. See
the instructive interview with Virilio on the theme of "infowars." It
may be that the next Ars Electronica compendium will show the events
of 11 September 2001 as equally pivotal in a shift in narratives
about capitalism, commerce, war and digital
communications.

Further transformations over this
20 year period need to be investigated. There are the early forays by
artists into the techniques of electronic media and their hesitant
justification, as in Hannes Leopoldseders 10 indications of an
"emerging computer culture" dated 1986. One senses a gradual
progression in the book from a preoccupation with technical matters
to a self-confident assurance that we are entering an era of "global
mind." Moravecs futuristic history of robotics, presented in
1991, concludes with a fiction of a robot surgeon gradually slicing
away at a living human brain to effect a painless transferral of mind
to micro-circuitry, the resultant entity able to enjoy a faster, and
altogether superior mode of thinking. This is not presented as a
thought experiment, but the conjecture of an actuality &emdash;
refuted by a later contribution by Peter Fromherz on the
implausibility of neuron-silicon junctions.

Early contributions also focus on
the possibilities of AI (artificial intelligence) as an exercise in
coding the workings of the mind. This is later displaced by an
interest in the body, reflecting not only the lack of results,
funding and power on the part of the AI project, but a transition to
a realm that more closely touches the interests of the arts, and
their investment in the themes of movement, dance, performance,
representations of the body, and art production. Clearly the populist
spread of the Internet is also a major factor in narrative
transformation, providing artists with a new medium about which to
purvey the anti-institutional attitude, and reviving an enthusiasm
for a community-based art, as indicated in Roy Ascotts
contribution on networking as the new (1989) metaphor.

The contributions also expose an
interesting tension between popular science and critical cultural
theory, as is evident in Richard Dawkins hyper-empiricist
polemic against religious beliefs as the perpetration of mind
viruses, inoculation against which comes from a good dose of reason.
Dawkins seems unaware of cleverer accounts of the development of
cultural artefacts provided by the critical cultural theorists who
populate the rest of the book, those inspired by Roland Barthes
account of myth, which implicates the Dawkins style of
techno-science and bourgeois aphorisms as just such a perpetration of
"mind viruses."

From the readings it is easy to see
what is so appealing about these digital narratives, whether from
popular science or elsewhere. They incite and provoke, and as such it
is less a question of their truth status or validity as their
productivity. For the artist, designer, and creative writer, the
preposterous ideas of Dawkins mind virus, Moravecs mind
melds, and Langtons machine evolution can fuel all kinds of
creative possibilities. The propositions are potent in their
simplicity, and their naivete. They also test the credibility of the
institution of science, or at least the margins of science from which
they seem to emanate. The laboratory is of course the site of a
different game to art, and its polemic is also motivated by a desire
to attract the substantial funds needed to sustain high-tech research
programs.

Much popular science is not by
scientists writing as scientists, but as quasi-philosophers, hobby
sociologists and ingenuous cultural theorists. Perhaps it is Donna
Haraway who is the rare example of a trained scientist and cultural
theorist aware of the power of the most absurd proposition: the
cyborg. Regrettably there is no contribution by Haraway in this
volume, but Hari Kunzru endorses the need to retain the power of the
cyborg to transgress: "the cyborg is still the baddest girl on the
block."

It seems that electronic arts is an
appropriating discipline, and long may it remain so. Whatever the
inspiration for Stelarcs stomach sculpture, third arm and
bionic ear, his effect seems to be to lay bare the absurd extremes of
Moravec and others. When new-age popular scientism is translated into
the area of performance then it becomes something else. It is perhaps
shown for what it is: a play of narratives. It moves into an arena
where irony, incongruity and provocation can have their play. An
interesting digital future would be one in which the tables are
turned, in which we use the arts as the measure of what is credible,
and science is seen to be but a certain form of play in the absurd.
Perhaps then science would draw on art, as much as Ars Electronica is
indebted to popular science.